Photography and imaging have undergone a huge transformation from film photography to digital photography in the last decade. Along with this transformation, many photo organization tools have been transformed, created, or updated to accommodate digital photos. For example, physical photo collections such as books as photo albums have been replaced with files and folders of photos, online photo collections, or local photo management applications. As another consequence of the digital photo revolution, users often take many more photos now than with film cameras because there is little or no additional cost associated with taking photos. Thus, the quantity of photos taken by users is exponentially higher, necessitating the development of additional photo organization tools. One common scheme is to organize photos into albums, or groups of related photos.
Users can manually organize photos, or photo management applications can provide some initial organization, such as organizing photos by the time and date the photos are imported into the photo management application. Organizing photos by import event is an improvement over no organization, but does not necessarily provide a very meaningful organization structure, and can actually lead to the user spending more time organizing photos. For example, a single import event may include photos that should be organized into multiple albums or multiple import events may include photos, or other types of content items, that should be organized into a single album.
Users often encounter similar problems when organizing imported items of other types besides photos, such as documents, electronic books, videos, emails, and so forth. For example, a user importing an archive of emails into an email management application only has a few options to organize them, such as organizing based on an existing folder structure, or organizing by date. Other organizations are difficult to arrange, and often require significant amounts of human interaction.